: Prometheans are weak. They're slow. They underperform compared to other
: Forerunner systems we've seen. They're comically, laughably underpowered,
: and their glowing holographic skull is a weak point that seems to exist to
: intimidate an enemy that can't be intimidated.

: Which is fine, if it was just the Didact alone on this. But all the other
: not-insane Prometheans looked at the Knight's spec-sheet and said
: "Yeah, I should get melted down into one of those things. Totally
: worth my free will."

: Then there's the fact that the Promethean weapons, which are so weak and
: inflexible as to barely qualify as a Forerunner's sidearm, are confirmed
: to be designs hundreds of years old by the time the Didact woke up from
: the Cryptum.

In these conversations I always like to bring up the Onyx Sentinels because of how hilariously superior they are to any of the in-game Prometheans in every way.

They can fly (in space too). Their standard attacks are much more powerful than any of the Promethean pew pew guns. They're also much more durable. They learn from every encounter and adapt to the enemy's tactics on the fly. They can combine to form any number of different specialist configurations and accumulate their offensive and defensive capabilities to the point of going up against starships. In general they can be used as anything from attack drones to building blocks to earthmovers.

And there were trillions of them at Onyx alone. And they were manufactured en masse with trivial ease. And the Greg Bear novels did nothing to suggest that this kind of thing was unusual to the Forerunners; instead, they only reinforce the idea that the norm in Forerunner warfare was to spam the enemy with lots and lots of drones until they die.

And there's no reason they wouldn't be available to the Didact, seeing as Onyx was a shield world and the shield worlds were his pet project.

So, again, why would any of the Prometheans, who were accustomed to having hundreds of thousands of drones many times more powerful than a Knight around as mere combat support, doom his soul to eternal agony imprisoned in a crappy bot that is easily outclassed by expendable combat drones?

To make it worth the sacrifice, a single Knight should've been a giant starship capable of cracking apart planets, detonating stars, deploying and controlling millions of drones, and seeding star systems and cometary clouds with automated foundries to mine them for raw materials and build even more ships and more drones to fling at the Flood. Essentially going full Von Neumann on the galaxy, and making the Didact's solution grimly pragmatic rather than completely batshit insane.